Surrounded by a curated tech and media crowd in the velvety environs of a private lounge in The Ned NoMad, Anthropic’s Jack Clark and The New York Times’ Ezra Klein debated whether we should expect a 3% or 30% explosion in GDP growth from AI. Although both of them find themselves at the lower end of that range, they said, they are surrounded by rationalists, accelerationists, and AI boosters in the latter camp, predicting a sea change unlike any other in economic history.
Regardless of how much you think AI will contribute to the economy in dollars and cents, however, it doesn’t answer the question of whether AI is going to be good for people. World War III would probably instigate tremendous GDP growth too—U.S. real GDP between 1940 and 1945 went up by 72%.
On that score, early in the conversation, Clark said something that struck me: “I think we’ve been given a chance to do a do-over of social media … but it’s bigger with even more wide-ranging effects that are even more diffuse and hard to detect. And we don’t have particularly great lessons from the first time around.” His observation led me to ask about something a friend of mine termed “the cigarette butler problem.” ...
